Page 108 of Dark King Daddy

She saw me looking.

I did not look away.

“Come here, Ksyusha.”

She stopped two steps inside the door. Her eyes held mine. The morning light from the garden windows fell across her face, catching the warm tones in her chestnut hair, the green in her hazel eyes. She crossed the remaining distance and stopped beside my chair.

Her hand came to my shoulder. Light. Deliberate. Her fingers rested on the wool of my sweater, and I felt the pressure of each one individually—four points of contact, mapped carefully onto my body.

“Is this our morning check-in?” she asked.

“Part of it.”

I set down the coffee. I turned in the chair to face her. She was close—close enough that I could smell her shampoo, something faint and clean, and beneath it the scent of warm morning skin.

“How do you feel about last night?”

Her hazel-green eyes held mine for a long, measured second. Then she bent and kissed me.

Her mouth was warm. Soft. She kissed me with the same confidence she had brought to the checklist—no hesitation, no testing, no tentative first contact. She placed her lips on mine and pressed and held, and her hand tightened on my shoulder, and I felt the contact move through my body in a single slow wave that started at my mouth and ended somewhere I could not afford to think about this early in the morning.

I kissed her back. My hand found her waist. The burgundy sweater was soft under my palm. I drew her closer—not enough to pull her into my lap, not enough to forget the security folder and the car waiting outside and the meeting at Beard Street. Enough to feel her lean into me. Enough to taste the coffee on her lower lip.

She lingered. Her fingers moved from my shoulder to the back of my neck. The touch was light, barely perceptible, her fingertips tracing the line of hair above my collar. I kept my hand on her waist. I did not pull her closer. I did not push her away. I held the line between morning and everything the morning wanted to become.

“That’s how I feel,” she said.

“So . . . broadly positive?” I smiled.

“Broadly positive,” she replied, matching my smile with one of her own.

The car horn sounded from the drive. One short blast. Ilya, punctual to the second.

Ksenia pulled back. Her hand slid from my neck. Her fingers traced along my jaw—a brief, deliberate touch, her thumb brushing the edge of my chin—and then she stepped away.

“We should go,” she said.

Her voice was steady. Her eyes were not. The green in them had darkened. The composure she wore was already rebuilding itself, brick by brick, but the mortar was still wet.

I stood and picked up the security folder. I picked up my coffee and drank the rest of it in one swallow.

We walked to the car. Ilya held the rear door. Ksenia slid in first. I followed. The door closed. The car pulled out of the drive.

She sat beside me with her bag on her lap and her hands folded on top of it and her posture immaculate. The composed professional. She looked out the window at the row houses passing on Van Brunt Street and gave no indication that three minutes ago she had kissed me in a way that made me want to cancel the entire day.

Fuck.

She had knelt for me last night. She had taken me in her mouth and made sounds I could hear in the silence of the car. She had looked up at me from the floor with her knees on the carpet and her eyes wide and dark and she had swallowed me down like she was dying of thirst.

I turned back to the security folder. The words sat on the page. I read the first line three times.

The car turned onto the BQE. The harbor appeared between buildings, grey and flat beneath the November sky. Ksenia set her phone in her lap and looked out the window.

I watched her reflection in the glass. The faint curve of her mouth. The way her hair moved against her jaw when the car turned. I had wanted to cancel the day. I had wanted to carry her upstairs and close the door and learn the rest of her. I had wanted to hear her say my name the way she had not said it last night.

Instead I was driving to Beard Street to discuss the assassination of my father.

I closed the folder.